Facebook is introducing new features for creators, including fan challenges and customizable top fan badges, designed to foster closer connections between creators and their followers.
The fan challenges feature allows creators to issue specific prompts to their audience. Fans can participate by creating and posting a reel or a standard post in response. Each challenge utilizes a specific hashtag, which populates a leaderboard that ranks submissions based on the number of reactions they receive, aiming to boost participation and engagement.
These types of challenges are already a popular, informal trend on short-form video platforms such as TikTok and Instagram Reels, where users often engage in dance challenges or create content based on trending audio. Facebook’s implementation formalizes this activity by providing a dedicated landing page for each creator’s specific challenge. For instance, a cooking creator could use the feature to invite their audience to share videos of dishes made with butternut squash to celebrate the fall season.
During a testing phase, creator Kalen Allen, who has 3.6 million Facebook followers, launched a challenge asking fans to create videos about their dreams and goals. This challenge resulted in approximately 520 entries. According to Meta, the feature was tested over a three-month period, during which fans submitted a total of 1.5 million challenge entries.
In addition to challenges, Facebook is now enabling creators to customize the “top fan” badges that are displayed next to the names of users who engage most frequently with their content. This allows for more personalized community recognition. For example, a top fan of Ed Sheeran could be designated a “Sheerio” instead of the generic “top fan” title. Other public figures, such as Cardi B and J Balvin, have also activated custom badges for their followers.
These updates signal an effort by Meta to position Facebook as a more significant platform for creator-fan interaction. Facebook is not generally considered as creator-focused as Instagram, which recently marked a milestone of 3 billion monthly active users. The new features aim to encourage more dedicated engagement from users on the platform.
This focus on human-to-human engagement comes shortly after Meta announced a separate development. Last week, the company revealed it would add a Reels-like video feed to its Meta AI app, which will be composed exclusively of AI-generated videos.
